The number of China's 3G mobile telecommunication users reached 18.08 million in March, an increase of 4.83 million from the first quarter, said a senior official with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT) Thursday...

... China Mobile took the biggest 3G market share at 42.5 percent, followed by China Telecom at 30.8 percent and China Unicom at 26.7 percent, Zhu Jun, deputy director of the ministry's telecom development department, told a press conference...

...The number of Internet users rose by about 20 million in the first quarter to hit 404 million in March, Zhu said. China had 191 million subscribers to the country's social networking sites in March.

By the end of 2009, China had 3.23 million domestic websites, said Zhu.

La Peikang, a deputy director of the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television, made the forecast on Saturday, the May 1 Labor Day holiday, one of the busiest movie-going weekends in the year, while speaking at an animated films forum in the eastern city of Hangzhou, the Xinhua News Agency said.

As the number of movie theaters quintupled from 2003-2009 to more than 5,000 to meet growing demand for entertainment among China's burgeoning middle class, China's boxoffice gross surged to 6.2 billion yuan ($909 million) last year, up from less than 1 billion yuan in 2003.

In 2009, films made in China took home a 56.6% share of the gross, while the rest was dominated by Hollywood films such as "Transformers II" and "2012."